9,346 research outputs found
Learning Audio Sequence Representations for Acoustic Event Classification
Acoustic Event Classification (AEC) has become a significant task for
machines to perceive the surrounding auditory scene. However, extracting
effective representations that capture the underlying characteristics of the
acoustic events is still challenging. Previous methods mainly focused on
designing the audio features in a 'hand-crafted' manner. Interestingly,
data-learnt features have been recently reported to show better performance. Up
to now, these were only considered on the frame-level. In this paper, we
propose an unsupervised learning framework to learn a vector representation of
an audio sequence for AEC. This framework consists of a Recurrent Neural
Network (RNN) encoder and a RNN decoder, which respectively transforms the
variable-length audio sequence into a fixed-length vector and reconstructs the
input sequence on the generated vector. After training the encoder-decoder, we
feed the audio sequences to the encoder and then take the learnt vectors as the
audio sequence representations. Compared with previous methods, the proposed
method can not only deal with the problem of arbitrary-lengths of audio
streams, but also learn the salient information of the sequence. Extensive
evaluation on a large-size acoustic event database is performed, and the
empirical results demonstrate that the learnt audio sequence representation
yields a significant performance improvement by a large margin compared with
other state-of-the-art hand-crafted sequence features for AEC
Self-Supervised Vision-Based Detection of the Active Speaker as Support for Socially-Aware Language Acquisition
This paper presents a self-supervised method for visual detection of the
active speaker in a multi-person spoken interaction scenario. Active speaker
detection is a fundamental prerequisite for any artificial cognitive system
attempting to acquire language in social settings. The proposed method is
intended to complement the acoustic detection of the active speaker, thus
improving the system robustness in noisy conditions. The method can detect an
arbitrary number of possibly overlapping active speakers based exclusively on
visual information about their face. Furthermore, the method does not rely on
external annotations, thus complying with cognitive development. Instead, the
method uses information from the auditory modality to support learning in the
visual domain. This paper reports an extensive evaluation of the proposed
method using a large multi-person face-to-face interaction dataset. The results
show good performance in a speaker dependent setting. However, in a speaker
independent setting the proposed method yields a significantly lower
performance. We believe that the proposed method represents an essential
component of any artificial cognitive system or robotic platform engaging in
social interactions.Comment: 10 pages, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental System
Deep Learning for Audio Signal Processing
Given the recent surge in developments of deep learning, this article
provides a review of the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for audio
signal processing. Speech, music, and environmental sound processing are
considered side-by-side, in order to point out similarities and differences
between the domains, highlighting general methods, problems, key references,
and potential for cross-fertilization between areas. The dominant feature
representations (in particular, log-mel spectra and raw waveform) and deep
learning models are reviewed, including convolutional neural networks, variants
of the long short-term memory architecture, as well as more audio-specific
neural network models. Subsequently, prominent deep learning application areas
are covered, i.e. audio recognition (automatic speech recognition, music
information retrieval, environmental sound detection, localization and
tracking) and synthesis and transformation (source separation, audio
enhancement, generative models for speech, sound, and music synthesis).
Finally, key issues and future questions regarding deep learning applied to
audio signal processing are identified.Comment: 15 pages, 2 pdf figure
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